We wanted to do something special and meaningful as a family, on this 50th anniversary of Earth Day and have decided to create a calendar for forming new sustainable habits!
We were particularly inspired by all the work being done by the Earth Day Network, the Nature Conservancy and their amazing nature preserves, the National Forest Foundation and their tree planting campaigns and especially by France Moore Lappe’s recent interview where she described how small changes can empower and energize, show us what is possible and strengthen our commitments. We were also inspired by our local paper company Greenfield Paper that makes 100% post consumer recycled paper right here in San Diego! The House that Lars built inspired all our colors, as what could be better than crafttherainbow on this very special Earth Day!
It turns out that forming a new habit can take any where from 18 to 264 days, and the average time it takes to form a new habit is 66 days, who knew! So we decided we would try to create new habits every 30 days, and learn what is possible. We’re committing ourselves to 12 small sustainable actions that we’re going to follow, one each, every 30 days, till next Earth Day, 2021. We’re calling it TwelveMonthsOfEarthDay, for lack of a better way to describe it!
Our little calendar.

We are going with “Month of: Being mindful of water use” in May! We have some ideas here that we have brainstormed:
Making new habits:
* Shorter daily showers: 3 minutes(!)

* Reduce hair wash shower by 5 minutes, very challenging!

* Add a shower bucket and use it to water the plants, learnt this one from our Girl Scouts troop!

* Scrape our dishes instead of rinsing.

* Use cold water washes for everything possible.

* Run full washer/dishwasher loads.

* Revisit our yard and sprinkler time.

* Do regular leak checks.

* Line dry clothes when we can(!)

Long Term
* Replace shower heads with lower flow heads: By replacing just one showerhead with a WaterSense labeled model, the EPA estimates the average family can save 2,900 gallons of water, the amount of electricity needed to power its home for 13 days, and more than $70 in energy and water costs every year, wow! 

* Divert roof top spout to our yard somehow.

* Aerators are faucet attachments that reduce water use, we will check if our faucets have them and if not, add them.

* Revisit our sprinkler system, currently it is a sprayer system and could be converted to drip irrigation.

We already have these:
* Low flow toilets

* Energy efficient dish washer

* Energy efficient clothes washer


We will track our water use and compare it with our water bills from past months too! We’ll post the final tally for May when we start our new Earth Day month in June. Let us hope we don’t end up using the most water in May!
We wanted to celebrate Earth Day and these commitments too! So we created nature prints on our plantable ornaments to remember each one by!

We’ve always wanted to make nature prints and Earth Day seemed a great time to try them, as we all shelter in place with all the time for a fun, messy activity! We’ve also had the book: Hand Printing From Nature by Laura Bethmann with us for many years and we’re finally ready to try it out!
We gathered all our goodies: watercolors, newspaper for the mess, kitchen sponge, scissors, 2 sets of our ornanments, a sampling of leaves and flowers that we have pressed for a day under some very large, heavy books!
And it turned out to be quite the messy project! What we learnt is, we need:
* Something with a ‘handle’ to hold the leaf or flower, so a longer stem is very useful!

* Make sure the items are pressed, cannot stress this enough!

* Some leaves work better than others!!

* We needed more paper than we thought, and towels too.

* Combinations of various leaf prints can create a flower print

* Celery and bok choy ends make lovely roses, who knew!

* Try on scratch paper before the ‘final’ one

* The prints are surprisingly pretty and one can create unexpected and unusual patterns

The basic way we made them is:
* Squirt or pour some paint on newspaper/paper plate or a ceramic plate.

* Dab sponge in color, we used a new kitchen sponge, that we cut into small rectangles that could be held at one end.

* Dab the colored sponge on the leaf or flower, enough to cover but not saturate. Too much color and the details are lost, too little and well, its just too little.

* Hold by stem, and place color side down on intended paper

* Release, press down with a towel for 15 seconds

* Remove towel, hold stem remove and set aside, color side up

* Repeat in different patterns and combinations for loveliness.

Here’s our Earth Day tree! Join us in our 12 months of Earth Day journey!! Share with us, we would love to hear from you!